Attention and individual behavioural variation in small-brained animals – using bumblebees and zebrafish as model systems

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Abstract

A vital ability for an animal is to filter the constant flow of sensory input from the
environment to focus on the most important information. Attention is used to
prioritize sensory input for adaptive responses. The role of attention in visual search
has been studied extensively in human and non-human primates, but is much less
studied in other animals. We looked at attentional mechanisms, especially selective
and divided attention where animals focus on multiple cues at the same time, using a
visual search paradigm. We targeted bumblebee and zebrafish as model species
because they are widely used as tractable models of information processing in
comparatively small brains. Bees were required to forage from target and distractor
flowers in the presence of predators. We found that bees could selectively attend to
certain dimension of the stimuli, and divide their attention to both visual foraging
search and predator avoidance tasks simultaneously. Furthermore, bees showed
consistent individual differences in foraging strategy; ‘careful’ and ‘impulsive’
strategies exist in individuals of the same colony. From the calculation of foraging
rate, it is shown that the best strategy may depend on environmental conditions. We
applied a similar behavioural paradigm to zebrafish and found speed-accuracy
tradeoffs and consistent individual behavioural differences. We therefore continued to
test how individuality influences group choices. In pairs of careful and impulsive fish,
the consensus decision is close to the strategy of the careful individual. The present
thesis provides implications for the study of animal attention, individuality differences
based on attentional strategies, the influence of individuality on animal group choices
and an exploration of the evolutionary pressures that favour stable individual
differences.